Strategy:Tough as Nails

Tough as nails gives a character a flat +1 armor. Generally speaking, this tends to a weaker defensive trait than Hellrunner, but there's a lot more to it than just that! Situations in which a player could benefit from a little extra armor, but has the option of retreating, are fairly common, and those are situations in which hellrunner shines. A much less common situation is that which sees a player under fire, and nowhere to retreat to. Less common, though, doesn't necessarily mean less important to preclude. In fact, we're all *so* familiar with that unlucky caves level that we enter surrounded by arachnotrons, or the panic-inducing start in a room with a pod of mancubi, revenants, and archviles - all that's required is another pod on the other side of the nearest door, and the game could abruptly end!

Tough as nails is a trait, of course, that provides more benefit the more damage we're taking. This actually *can* be significant in choosing defensive traits! For example, the technician, with his ability to use medikits almost instantly, will tend to carry a few more health packs and tank a little more damage (while a scout would be more likely to roll the dice of phase devices or rocket jumps).

Most importantly, though, I feel it needs to be mentioned that tough as nails is working at its best when incoming after other defense is low, but greater than 1. There is one situation in which almost all damage sources are adjusted to this 'sweet spot' - cerberus armor. Cerberus armor only offers a little protection from bullet attacks, which are typically in the range of 2-8, and if the cerberus armor is power-modded, that will result in an average of 3 damage, reduced to 1 from TaN! Cerberus armor similarly fails to defend well against shotguns, which are significantly more powerful, but the 'armor counts double' quirk of shrapnel means that TaN makes a similar reduction to former sergeants - about 70% damage reduction! Then we have the energy attacks, which hit hard (let's say, 16 damage on average?); Cerberus armor's resistance% hugely reduces these down to about 5 damage, and then the p-mod takes it down to that familiar sweet spot, 3! Put that all together, and it turns out that a couple of levels of tough as nails actually more than double the survivability of a doomguy wearing p-modded cerberus. This is more than a little convenient, given that cerberus armor is pretty much the go-to late-game defensive goal if no fancy uniques are found!

I suspect that by the time players are building cerberus armor regularly, they have already judged and excluded TaN from their list of go-to traits, but I feel that the two synergise well enough to ultimately put TaN amongst the very top of the defensive trait choices.